Color Is A Beautiful Thing
Multi-disciplinary artist Alteronce Gumby is pleased to announce his first monograph, Color is a Beautiful Thing, published by Charles Moffett and False Flag Galleries. The book follows Gumby’s spring 2021 dual-site exhibition of new work at both galleries, Somewhere Under the Rainbow / The Sky is Blue and What am I.
The book acts as a survey of Gumby’s career from 2015 to 2021, touching on his longtime thematic considerations of how light, physics, natural energies and color can be contextualized into a larger societal conversation about race. Gumby’s work also includes social considerations pertaining to the spiritual practices native to the locations from which he sources the gemstones featured across his oeuvre. Also explored is the artist’s present-day elucidation of mid century geometric abstraction; Gumby appropriates the movement’s formal qualities while imbuing the work with themes and influences diametric to the reductive nature and prescribed forms of the midcentury canon.
The book features an essay by Guggenheim Curator Ashley James and an introductory interview conducted by Gagosian Director Antwaun Sargent
Cross Colours
Bode Projects is pleased to present the solo exhibition ‘Cross Colours’ by the painter Alteronce Gumby. Alteronce Gumby is an abstract contemporary artist, working across different disciplines, expanding the pictorial language of his works and media.
Alteronce Gumby's paintings subvert traditional understandings of light and colour through the nuanced application of glass and oil paint on panel. The power of complimentary colours in the presented works refers to Joseph Albert’s Interaction of Colour, the colour theory of complimentary simultaneous contrast, where colours are pushing away from one to another. There is an optical illusion created in the unification of pigments, bleeding over from one over the other, and allowing the light and glass to refract those colours from one piece to the next. The glass panels consist of a push and pull action, when thinking about magnetic forces, gravity, pushing away, at the same time, bringing something together. Therefore an ‘otherness’ of language was created with a specific use of colours, Alteronce Gumby describes strong influences by Expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Wilhelm de Kooning, therefore using the interplay of contrast.
“Whether it is one force or another, by creation and destruction, stars explode, and the galaxy gives birth to new stars; there is a force of gravity which forms the planets. There is the same on earth; you have to crack eggs to make an omelette, I am approaching my studio practice with the same.”
– Alteronce Gumby
